Coda is a modification of Unreal Tournament 3 which focuses on thoughtful, unforgiving, competitive, fast paced and stylish gameplay. It will provide several interesting systems which players will have to use in harmony in order to defeat their opponents. Initially the mod will focus around an original sword fighting system based on mouse movements. Next magic and psionic energy systems will be implemented, and tightly integrated into the sword fighting gameplay. Coda will feature a player control system which borrows mechanics from fighting games such as Guilty Gear. Several maps and completely original characters are planned. Stay tuned for frequent updates, this mod is currently under rapid development.

The Coda team is proud to announce that Coda, previously available only for PC has gone Beta and is now also available for Playstation 3. Coda features a fully automated self-installer as well as an auto updater. Players who already have a copy of the Coda Alpha should be able to simply run the updater found in the Coda section of the Windows Start Menu. New PC and PS3 players and can get a fresh copy from www.codamod.com/downloads. More detailed instructions on installing the game for PS3 as well as PC can be found in the Coda Wiki.

Playstation 3 support isn't the only change for this Coda release there have also been simple bots added to help new players become accustomed to Coda's gameplay beyond reading the online manual. By popular demand mounted sword combat for the Coda Mule has been added complete with all the normal Coda sword combat mechanics such as stuns, clashes and whiffs. See a screen of this below.

If you experience what appears to be a crash on your first time playing Coda, and you have custom characters install, don't panic. Coda will lock up for a moment while it creates shader files for these characters and then resume once this is complete. You can avoid this delay by moving your custom characters out of the UTGame\Published directory before playing Coda. We understand this sucks and it will be fixed in the next version.

There have also been substancial updates to Coda's elemental swords. Among these is the ability to use Nature to create trees that impede your opponents, a lightning fast dash move using Sky, and reflecting magic thrown at you using Water.

The Coda team would also like to thank Mischa_Silden for offering to provide the Finnish localization included in this latest version of Coda. If you'd like to help with localization for other languages, just email Bowie.

If this isn't enough Coda news for you there is a great post on how to follow Coda's progress more closely over on the Coda Forums.

I like the strong contrast lighting! Are your meshes emissive,or how does that work?
I can't identify everything on the lower pic. Is this the gibbing of a slain enemy captured, or what are the lumbs around the (enourmous) sword?

You can find the full changelog at Codamod.com . You can also checkout our MantisBT changelog at Codamod.com . They are both a little verbose so I might make a new "features" changelog with the next release ;)

We have discovered a problem with UT3 custom characters crashing this version of Coda. If you have custom characters installed for UT3, please move the folders out of the Published folder before you play. We understand that this sucks, and are working on a fix now.

Are you on the PS3 or PC? If you are on PC and have custom characters installed, please move the folders out of the Published folder before you play. What appears to be a crash is actually Coda trying to generate shaders for all your custom characters, which it will never use. We understand that this sucks, and are working on a fix now.

I've seen some other people having this issue with Unreal Tournament 3. Can you post the information about your Microsoft Windows version(XP,Vista) and the service pack(e.g. SP1, SP2, SP3) you have installed and i'll see if I can figure out the problem.